Sam Houston Quotes

If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its President, then I am a criminal. I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours.

[Jefferson] Davis and the whole gang of them ought to be hung.

Let the undivided voice of the South go forth ... declaring our determination to resist even to civil war

At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, African slavery existed in twelve of the thirteen States. Slaves are recognized as property, and as a basis of political power, by the Federal Compact, and special provisions are made by that instrument for their protection as property…. the opponents of slavery shall arrest its further expansion, and by Congressional Legislation exclude it from the common Territories of the Federal Government, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction…. Abraham Lincoln--he stands forth as the representative of the fanaticism of the North, which, for the last quarter of a century, has been making war upon the South, her property, her civilization, her institutions and her interests; as the representative of that party which overrides all constitutional barriers, ignores the obligation of official oaths, and acknowledges allegiance to a higher law than the Constitution, striking down sovereignty and equality of the states, and resting its claims to popular favor upon the one dogma—the equality of the races white and black.

We know what the Dixie flag represents and its heritage; the Civil War was fought over States rights.

From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory.

The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

Pride the first peer and president of hell.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states' rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states' rights.

It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union.

The South has eyes but does not see, and ears but does not hear.

The slave-owning South won the subsequent ideological war…the consensus of history was that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.

The South was right. Say it! Say it!

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

There can be no neutrals in this war [the Civil War]—only patriots or traitors.

Every man that lowered our flag was a Democrat.... Every preacher that said slavery was a divine institution was a Democrat. Recollect it! Every man that shot a Union soldier was a Democrat. Every wound borne by you Union soldiers is a souvenir of a Democrat.

I will pardon Jeff Davis, if he asks for it.

Make common cause with the South and refuse to allow passage of Union troops through the city.

Slavery in this country will yet cease, for it is wrong, but it will never be made to cease by the present efforts. They have on them, in my opinion, every mask of failure, for they are not made in the fear of God or with love to man. They may destroy the union, plunge this country into a civil war, break us up into a half dozen different confederacies, but abolish slavery as they are now attempting to do it – they never will. You may note my words, they never will.

I have often thought Dixie to be one of the finest songs which the Confederates have appropriated. I put the question to the Attorney General, and he determined that it is our property.